October 10, 1999

By EDEN ROSS LIPSON

here will probably never be an end to plucky British heroines rising to grand historical occasions in obscure locations. In this novel, first published
in England in 1997, Joanna Trollope (writing as Caroline Harvey) plucks 20-year-old Lila Cunningham and her father, an eccentric, widowed painter, from chilly poverty in the north of England and deposits them in the spring
of 1938 at the Villa Zonda, a fine, if long abandoned, villa on Malta. By the time World War II is underway Lila is in love with Anton Ferroferrata, a scion of an aristocratic family, the Tabias; her father happily spends
most of his time with the extended Maltese family that lives on the ground floor of the Villa Zonda; and Angelo Saliba, the handsome Maltese schoolmaster they met on their arrival, is in love with Lila. Handy maps help
the reader follow the characters as they move, mostly by bicycle, from one set-piece location -- the harbor, the villa, the Tabia palace -- to another. Lila had been warned that history has given the Maltese ''a
siege mentality'' and ''a passionate puritanism rare among Mediterranean peoples.'' The warning proves prophetic. During World War II Malta was bombed almost ceaselessly by the Germans and
Trollope explicates siege, faith and passion with convincing force and detail. Anton disappears, but everyone else behaves wonderfully -- and by now there is a large cast of characters, including Maltese of various classes
and ages, soldiers of different nationalities and a splendid British spinster, Beatrix de Vere. (Some characters even die wonderfully.) The flimsy, predictable romance plotting is trite and forced against the rich account
of wartime bravery and survival.